More than one motherly viewer who has seen her in TV plays has telephoned Ursula Howells to advise her how to get some happiness into her life. She has had to play so many neurotic, ill-treated women, that some viewers have convinced themselves that she must be unhappy in real life!

She is, however, happily married to an industrial consultant; and the only time she gets anywhere near “the mopes” is when his business takes him abroad and she is missing him.

Despite her run of tragic TV parts, she says she is very happily “at home” at Lime Grove. She has worked so much in TV that she finds the job like working among friends. Even the dingy rehearsal rooms she likes, as familiar places, full of the memories of other happy occasions in preparing previous plays.

It was the theatre, however, that gave Ursula her TV debut. That was when a West End theatre production of the play Frieda was taken to the Alexandra Palace studios. To this West End part Ursula had come by dint of hard work in the provinces.

At the time of evacuation in the last war, Herbert Howells, Ursula s famous composer father, decided his daughter had best move from London to Dundee. The girl, hardly out of her teens, began to get back-stage jobs at the local repertory theatre. A chance came for her to start playing parts.

Then the producer Anthony Hawtrey went to Dundee, promoted Ursula to leads, and took her with him when he took over the management of that “shop-window” theatre in London, the Embassy.

Soon Frieda followed, then other West End parts, good supporting roles in films, and a string of TV parts. She went with Patrick Barr and Peter Cushing to Germany with the TV play Portrait of Peko, which the BBC “exported” to the German Radio Show.

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By adding dancing to her TV appearances, singer Eve Boswell cornered her own bit of the 1954 TV limelight. In fact the dancing was not new to Eve. As a young girl going round the European circuses with her parents — a circus act — she pirouetted and hand-balanced as though born to it. As indeed she had been.

But her voice took on a more dominant role in her grown-up career — until the summer before last, when the dancing feet appealed for attention again. She was in a summer show at Blackpool, and at rehearsal one day was watching the show’s corps de ballet practising. The tune and the movement took her feet into a number of spins and movements, as she waited in the wings. Seeing this, the ballet master challenged Eve to do the same high jinks with the corps de ballet. Doing so. Eve found herself feeling very much at home. So she took a refresher course in dancing.

Hungary is Eve Boswell’s native land, though she was discovered in South Africa, largely as a radio singer. She worked there for some years, and married there at the age of eighteen. Before the war, her parents appeared in their comedy-instrumentalist circus act on TV at Alexandra Palace. Eve, even smaller than now, was with them and passed all but unnoticed.

Circus work took her right across South Africa in circus trains and in a caravan home. When her caravan was parked for the night in a railway siding, a sudden storm struck down some overhead electric cables, which fell on the circus train and set it on fire. Lions and tigers escaped, and one tiger looked in on Eve as he passed by her caravan door. A great deal was lost in the fire, but Eve and her home on wheels escaped. Now she lives in London, in a flat behind the BBC, and goes down to the country to see her young son at his prep school.

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